I’ve now written a bunch of DAI Anders banters too, but this is the most important one.
Cole: You think they hate you. Anders: I’d ask you to be more specific, but I think that applies to most people at this point. Cole: The mages. The ones you freed. You think they hate you. Anders: They’re afraid. I don’t blame them for that. Someday their children or grandchildren will be grateful. Or rather, they’ll be free, and they won’t even think to be grateful for it. That’s the goal. That’s what matters. Cole: “Why don’t we have to go to the Circle anymore?” a young boy asks. The woman smiles at the son she never thought she’d see again. “Because there are good people in this world after all.” A man kneels by the statue in the garden, hands clasped. “Wherever he is, let him be safe and happy,” he says, praying for the savior he’s never met. Cole: They are grateful. Anders: I… Oh. Cole: You’re crying? I’m sorry, I thought it would help. Anders: No, I’m… it did. It does. Thank you, Cole.
So I’ve been like, neck deep in DA-RP for a while now, and for fun we were all making artbreeder portraits for our muses. Well, I’ve tried in the past to make an Anders portrait and could never really quite get him.
Well. On a whim, I tried messing with it some more and more and-
I have a theory that came up in a discussion today, so i did a little research, and now i’m collecting my thoughts here.
solas says a demon is a spirit that has been corrupted and turned away from its purpose. we know in game that wisdom becomes pride, and i theorize that justice becomes sloth.
when you take anders to the fade, justice has a lot to say about torpor, the demon of sloth that tries to sway hawke to allow it to posses feynriel, when they first meet the demon, justice has a warning for hawke,
“a demon of sloth, it exists to make men forget their purpose and their pride, do not relax around it”
justice specifically associates sloth with a loss of purpose.
justice has another warning for hawke if they decide to hear torpor out,
“don’t listen to him! sloth demons prey on your trust.”
and then when torpor gets to the part about wanting to possess feynriel,
“this is a monster! it asks you to sacrifice an innocent to its ambition!”
we know that justice hates demons, (all jokes about trading with “not very reasonable” hunger demons aside), but he does not have such an extreme reaction to other demons as he does when it comes to sloth,
“This is a creature of complacency, of injustice, i cannot let you treat with it!
he specifically calls the sloth demon a creature of injustice, with complacency ranked right up there as unjust.
that takes us to elthina. who could be described as complacent. meredith and her templars were the ones killing and abusing mages, but elthina was justice’s and anders’ target in the end. (i’m not going into the impracticality of attacking the templars directly right now, but that likely would not have worked anyway) because it was elthina’s complacency, her sloth, that allowed these injustices to happen. she had the power to stop it, but she did not take action, so in the end, she was the real enemy for anders and justice to end.
the sloth and complacency of those who could end injustices were the real enemy for justice, so i think that would mean sloth is a corrupted spirit of justice, which would also explain justice’s extreme hatred of torpor.
Revisiting this because I just remembered a few things…
Anders/Justicedoes directly accuse Elthina (and the Kirkwall Chantry in general) of sloth in Act 3:
Anders: How can you keep standing up for her?
Sebastian: Who?
Anders: That doddering old biddy of a Grand Cleric.
Sebastian: How dare you! Elthina is everything a grand cleric should be. She’s holy, wise—
Anders: Spineless… hesitant. She’s clay in Meredith’s hands.
Sebastian: In the face of danger, sometimes the bravest thing is to stand back and trust that the Maker will see justice done.
Anders: Well if doing nothing sums up your religion, then Elthina is perfect. Personally, I’d prefer a Chantry that favors action oversloth.
And guess what Justice tells a pro-Templar Hawke (Act 3, Rivalry route)?
Hawke: Whatever you planned, there’s still time to stop it.
Anders: Yes. Time… maybe there’s still time.
Justice: Leave! This does not concern you!
Hawke: This is Anders’s decision, not yours!
Justice: I amAnders.You have given into sloth. You would stand by while mages are abducted and tortured. Go. Anders has no need of you.
World of Thedas (vol. 1) also has this rather interesting quote on sloth demons (p. 141):
Sloth demons are not themselves slothful — they are so named because they feed upon the slothful recesses of the psyche: doubt, apathy, and entropy…
Sloth demons can disguise their appearance outside the Fade so as to covertly spread their influence. It is said they can influence entire groups of people. A community afflicted by a demon of sloth could soon become a dilapidated pit where injustices are allowed to pass without comment and none of the residents are aware that a change has even occurred.
(All emphases mine, of course)
In the first banter, Anders equates the choice “to stand back and trust that the Maker will see justice done” (in Sebastian’s words) with “sloth,” all the while characterizing the “sloth” that enables injustice as worse than directly inflicting injustice. By aiding and abetting Knight-Commander Meredith, Elthina is guilty of the sin of sloth — as is a Hawke who does the same. Moreover, these are the only invocations of “sloth” in the entire game that aren’t in direct reference to Torpor the sloth demon, Justice’s bête noire in Night Terrors.
We hear echoes of these arguments during Anders’s speech in The Last Straw (Act 3) when destroying the Kirkwall Chantry.
While he says to a pro-Templar Hawke, “You would stand by while mages are abducted and tortured” (an intolerable expression of “sloth”), during his speech, Anders exclaims (emphasis mine):
“I will not stand byand watch you [Meredith] treat all mages like criminals…
…while those who would lead us bow to their templar jailers.”
And just as he tells Sebastian he prefers “action over sloth” in the political sphere (even by enemies), Anders here demands:
“The time has come to act. There can be no half-measures.”
Overall, Justice exhibits a tendency to denounce negative actions, feelings, and traits in ways that align with the types of demons — “desire” in general is bad because demons are “perverted by their desires”; it’s wrong to “envy” Kristoff’s love for Aura because “envy is what a demon feels, a desire for something it cannot have”; and so on. After merging with Justice, Anders in DA2 acquires Justice’s obsessive hatred of demons (which the former had no real opinion on beforehand) and insists that “demons prey on the deadly sins of mankind” (Tranquility, Act 1) and “break down very clearly into different sins” (Act 1 banter). So it’s no wonder they seek to define human misdeeds in terms of demonic corruption.
Traditionally the sin of “sloth” has connoted not just simple laziness in the modern sense (e.g., being unproductive at work or school) but a neglect of one’s responsibilities to others and/or a lack of accountability. At its core it’s believed to stem from acedia, meaning apathy or indifference. The Kirkwall Chantry, as the governing authority of the Gallows, was supposed to exercise oversight over the Templars (who are, after all, the Chantry’s own army) and protect the mages within, but throughout the game they clearly aren’t doing so. In fact, the corruption can be traced back at least to 9:21 Dragon (about a decade before the start of Act 1), when Meredith and Elthina overthrew Viscount Perrin Threnhold at the behest of the Orlesian Chantry and ruled Kirkwall as more or less a puppet dictatorship ever since. Elthina can be labeled guilty of “sloth” (in the traditional sense) in that she had totally abdicated her responsibility to her charges while refusing to relinquish power.
Back in Awakening, while he doesn’t use the word “sloth,” Justice criticizes Anders’s hesitation to fight the Chantry (explicitly on account of fear of death and destruction) as “apathy,” which “is a weakness.” Justice argues that Anders, as someone who has “seen oppression and [is] now free,” has “a responsibility” or “an obligation” to “free those who remain oppressed.” Regardless of player choices, Hawke, if not a mage him/herself, has/had a mage sister and a mage father, and as such could be subjected to the same criticisms as Anders had been in Awakening. Hawke at the very least owes their life to a mage’s decision to flee the Circle and raise a family in hiding, and by supporting the Circle and the Templars, they are helping eliminate these very opportunities for others. The situation is even worse with a mage Hawke, who is denying others of their kind the very freedoms that they themself enjoy. Hence they “have given into sloth.”
A Sloth demon could be a corrupted spirit of Justice — having given up its purpose of fighting injustice (just as a sloth demon “exists to make men forget their purpose”) and accepted the status quo, much like a corrupted spirit of Compassion could become a demon of Despair, abandoning any attempts to ameliorate pain in favor of putting victims out of their misery. But Justice could just as easily despise Sloth for being its polar opposite. After all, in any given system of oppression, the number of true psychopaths and fanatics tends to be relatively small (the former especially so), making the system heavily reliant on the participation of ordinary people. In order for it to be maintained, it’s only necessary that the majority of people do not care enough to stop it — they allow it to continue because they believe the victims deserve their fate (and thus are not worthy of moral concern, at least not in this regard) and/or because they or their loved ones aren’t personally affected and therefore prefer to just let it go. In other words, they are “slothful” (or apathetic and thus guilty of acedia) with regard to their fellow citizens. Just as justice is an active virtue or ideal, which must be consciously pursued and requires vigilance, sloth is an inherently passive sin, in which evil occurs not out of malice but out of apathy.
And while I doubt that Kirkwall was literally afflicted by a sloth demon, the city might accurately be described as “a dilapidated pit where injustices are allowed to pass without comment” by all but a few. The result is the same.
Hespith was right all along: “But the true abomination… is not that it occurred, but that it was allowed.”
Thinking abt this excellent post + the observation that Anders’ hatred of demons likely comes from Justice (in short: Anders doesn’t mention any particularly strong opinions about demons in Awakening, but Justice expresses extensive opinions) and I think that’s REALLY interesting from a perspective of his interactions with Merrill. Particularly thinking about this:
Anders: Maybe you don’t really understand the difference between spirits and demons. Merrill: Did I ask you? Anders: Spirits were the first children of the Maker, but He turned his back on them to dote on His mortal creations. Anders: The ones who resented this became demons, driven to take everything mortals had and gain back the Maker’s favor. Merrill: Your “Maker” is a story you humans use to explain the world. Merrill: We have our own stories. I don’t need to borrow yours.
The way their arguments are generally presented/understood is a cultural difference between Circle magic training and the Dalish, and that’s clearly how Merrill understands the interaction. Anders does also call attention to it being a difference with the Dalish (”Do Dalish honestly not recognize the difference between demons and beneficial spirits?”), but there’s another point - from Justice’s perspective, it’s a difference between having existed within the Fade and not having that experience.
In a sense, Anders’ beliefs about Merrill are backed up by the experience of the spirit he shares his brain with - it’s not just a difference in teaching. But Merrill still 100% has a point in their exchanges - she holds the belief that Justice is not inherently good, but is instead fallible, and she’s right! See their (potential, the version with the other quest ending is verydifferent and doesn’t touch on this debate between them) banter post-Dissent:
Anders: You’re sorry? For me? This could be you! You could be the next monster threatening helpless girls! Merrill: Anders… There’s no such thing as a good spirit. There never was. Merrill: All spirits are dangerous. I understood that. I’m sorry that you didn’t.
This is sointeresting from a perspective of understanding Justice, because it illuminates Dissent as the moment not only when Anders starts to worry about his own path, but also the point where Justice realises that his understanding of himself, built up over the course of his existence, isn’t absolute. And a young woman who made a deal with a demon might just understand him better than he understands himself.
Basically: Merrill is a challenge to the justification Anders and Justice have had all along that what they’re doing will always be just, because that’s Justice’s nature. And she’s right - Justice is more complicated than either of them previously thought.
I commissioned @dichordart for my elf-blooded Hawke cuddling with Justice and Anders from my “The Healer and The Bard” series, and I can’t begin to say how much I love this pic ♥ (I’m a sucker for justhanders fluff)
I have a headcanon that Justice isn’t capable of sleeping. That’s part of the reason why Anders is tired all the time. Who wouldn’t get antsy having to stay still for 7-8 hours with nothing to do if you’re not capable of sleep. Justice gets bored, and then he gets restless, and then he accidentally wakes up Anders. So when the three of them start living together (and Garrett finds out about the sleeping issues) he starts buying books for Justice to read to give him something quiet to do while him and Anders sleep. The three of them get into the habit of reading together on their off hours between jobs and writing and adventures.
I’m so glad you like it, and thank you so much for commissioning me!!
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